Fairmount Line Upgrade

Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

i see they're not putting catenary up on this inner city Indigo Line (which i think looks very good, otherwise).... Did they mention if moving toward eventual electrification has been considered - and if a workable plan made it deep into the playoff rounds?

....Would have been nice to see the Siemans, French or Japanese to build us some badass, electric trains that run seriously good..... Instead of looking forward to tens of thousands of tons of new diesel fumes with these latter-day whatevertheyare's..... btw, i can't believe they're still running diesel on the the Providence/NEC, and not evolving....

time to go for broke.

 
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Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

City leaders see new use for old South Boston railroad track

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I rate this a "worth studying" but like the Back Bay connection, it takes a rail bridge to work.

My take:
- Pro: Connects Fairmont to service/convention jobs @BCEC, @Seaport.
- Pro: Could connect to Silver near Massport police station
- Pro: Could facilitate CR-CR transfers at Readville
- Con: Won't work without 15 ~ 20 min frequencies
- Con: takes a rail flyover.

Could that flyover be shared with the Widett Loop so that a Back Bay - South Station DMU could use it too?
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

The missing piece of information for me is how many Fairmount Line riders are heading to the Seaport versus heading to jobs downtown or are transferring at South Station to the red line. I suspect that the latter two destinations are much more important, and that directing half of the trains to the Seaport would make most Fairmount Line commutes worse.

Capacity and speed improvements to help people get from South Station over to the Seaport would be a more beneficial use of the $x0 million this would probably cost.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Yeah, I don't get this one. I'll say until I'm blue in the face that the HOV tunnel under the channel, re purposed, could be the low-cost solution to Seaport transit. Continue an OL branch under/along the Pike and in, then voila - Back Bay to Seaport direct.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Yeah but then you are reducing the headways on the orange line from downtown to Malden in half which would be incredibly detrimental to its ability to handle the ridership it receives. The author of Pedestrian Observations has a good article on why that is a bad idea called The Wrong Kind of Branching.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Here it is...the annual campaign where BCEC bitches to the city about some traffic disaster-week, city whispers to the Globe, and some new fringe transit plan with no supporting maths gets talked up as a 'thing' that could 'happen' if only somebody else would pay for it. :rolleyes:


1. What demand has been established for a dinky from middle-lower income residential Hyde Park and Dorchester to the "glass-walled offices and swanky restaurants" [ed. FIRE that reporter for this sentence!] of the Seaport? They have one-seats to South Station. The biggest mobility problems to the Seaport are the folks who have to make the double-transfer from Green @ Park or Orange @ DTX to reach the overcrowded Silver Line and grind the Red Line to a halt in the process. Not southside commuter railers who can walk right downstairs. You do realize Page 3 of the Blue Book quotes exactly how much bigger each subway line is than the entirety of commuter rail?



2. If you're so sure there is demand from the outer neighborhoods, why don't you test this theory yourselves first with an LMA shuttle on the Haul Road instead of inventing alternate universes where the T can un-cancel the DMU order and give you toys you don't have to pay for? Ruggles-->Melnea Cass-->Haul. Costing thousands of dollars in annual operating cost with a private operator instead of tens of millions in capital cost and several mil in operating cost from an imperiled public operator. It involves one transit line (Orange) and bus hub (Dudley/Ruggles) that doesn't connect to South Station, and 4 commuter rail lines that do. Ergo, if there's going to be BCEC demand from Readville you'll see some leading indicators testable with real maths out of the data from the Ruggles LMA trial.

Or pick another corridor and try something else along that motif. North Station LMA's with BTD applying some elbow grease along the Greenway for traffic priority? Something else entirely? C'mon, Walsh! You hired some smartass "czar" exactly for this purpose. Let's see this whiz kid brainstorm something small but meaningful that can be implemented entirely within your purview before asking Santa for the entire FAO Schwarz toy catalog.

No...doesn't suit your fancy? Then fuck off, "city leaders", because you're just monorail-ing for idle distractions from solving real problems again. If you're so worried about the Red and Silver Lines melting down...why don't you do something within your own means to help that and compel the state with some action? And maybe expend a little more energy screaming from the mountaintops about pants-shitting fear that the Red and Silver Lines melting down will stall out the Seaport economy instead of inventing more irrelevant excuses for shiny toy baubles that don't address Economic Terror Threat #1.



3. Maybe the reason Fairmount is so "cancellation-prone" is not because the trains are empty and it's perpetuating a vicious cycle of slew-footing them off the schedule. Seeing as how that's possibly illegal and certainly something "city leaders" such as the Mayor, the Mayor's new transpo czar profiled here, and the Council have the power to formally investigate. Maybe it's far more mundane, such as: LONG-TERM STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS WITH THE AGENCY LEAVES THEM UNABLE TO RUN WHAT THEY HAVE. Just this week the T had to ask Mommy FCMB for rubber-stamp approval to send 19 completely healthy, active-roster coaches to a private company in freakin' Delaware because they are so short-staffed in Somerville that they have fallen 20 cars and several months behind on keeping up with mundane 4-year FRA inspections. This isn't even the 12 non-retired locomotives sitting dead and shuffling emergency repair RFP's around because they're 1-2 years behind on the repair queue. This is completely operational stuff they can't run because of the functional equivalent of a DMV office that only hired 1 person to man the counter for license renewals.

And Walsh's handpicked braintrust thinks the equipment and manpower shortage that's killing the entire purple system is a DEMAND problem with the Seaport???



There it is...the dumbest thing I've read all day. "We've tried nothing, including trying nothing to ascertain where our own demand comes from...so let's ask somebody else for the 18th time to give us free bread-and-circuses for non-specific somethingorother because work is hard." Our institutions are hopeless.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Intuition suggests there is no demand that crosses the threshold without getting the (3) South Shore lines' + possibly the Providence Line commuters the option to 'get on.' Is it doable, or without it's own nightmare/s? Did anyone even bother to ask?
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

citylover94 said:
Yeah but then you are reducing the headways on the orange line from downtown to Malden in half which would be incredibly detrimental to its ability to handle the ridership it receives. The author of Pedestrian Observations has a good article on why that is a bad idea called The Wrong Kind of Branching.
Click to expand...

This is crazy pitch territory but...

...not determintal to headways if its a triangle with three -equally weighted destinations, rather than a branched system with x in malden and x/2 at forest hills and x/2 at seaport....

But anyway - yes our institutions are broken ...
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

odurandina said:
What about the (3) South Shore lines' + Providence Line commuters having the option to change over. Is it doable, or without it's own nightmare/s? Did anyone even bother to ask?
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I addressed exactly that in the post.

Blue Book daily ridership:
RED: 272,684
GREEN: 227,645
ORANGE: 203,406
PURPLE (all, N + S): 129,075*
SILVER (Transitway-only): 16,056

*southside vs. north was a 63/37 ridership split in inbound counts; since same split would hold on the return trip, daily totals come out to: ~81,300 South, ~48,750 North.


Now start at the bottom of that list with Silver--which they correctly note is too crowded--and work your way up. Remember that southside commuter rail is the ONLY mode that can go right downstairs to Silver without touching Red. Orange and Green have to transfer to Red. Blue (63,225 riders) and all but 1-2% of bus routes (360,171 riders excluding the Transitway) have to transfer somewhere that dumps on Red.

Now rank each mode by where most of the congestion is coming from. Purple-south won't crack the Top 5. The big 3 colors, and the double-transfers hitting Red (Blue, Purple-north, the buses) all dwarf it. Dwarf ALL of the southside. Now isolate Fairmount from the whole rest of the southside that's dwarfed like a zit by the other modes, and see how utterly un-serious Walsh's czarina is being here.



No...of course they didn't bother to ask.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Arlington said:
City leaders see new use for old South Boston railroad track

graphic2-5963.jpg
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This would be better used as a light rail line, as part of the Urban Ring. I checked on Google maps, and the single track along the Haul Road could be widened to two tracks with a retaining wall and new bridges, without taking out any buildings.

If there's no freight using it, then LRV would be feasible on this line and relatively cheap. It could continue to the west along Melnea Cass for an LRV line between Ruggles and the Seaport, with possible continuation on its north end into the existing Silver Line tunnel to South Station.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Charlie_mta said:
This would be better used as a light rail line, as part of the Urban Ring. I checked on Google maps, and the single track along the Haul Road could be widened to two tracks with a retaining wall and new bridges, without taking out any buildings.

If there's no freight using it, then LRV would be feasible on this line and relatively cheap. It could continue to the west along Melnea Cass for an LRV line between Ruggles and the Seaport, with possible continuation on its north end into the existing Silver Line tunnel to South Station.
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But where are you going to feed the LRV vehicles from? You are proposing a line that is totally disconnected from the existing LRV system, the Green Line. So you need a yard (or more) and a maintenance facility.... NOT CHEAP.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Charlie_mta said:
This would be better used as a light rail line, as part of the Urban Ring. I checked on Google maps, and the single track along the Haul Road could be widened to two tracks with a retaining wall and new bridges, without taking out any buildings.

If there's no freight using it, then LRV would be feasible on this line and relatively cheap. It could continue to the west along Melnea Cass for an LRV line between Ruggles and the Seaport, with possible continuation on its north end into the existing Silver Line tunnel to South Station.
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I tried responding to Ari's blog post on this about doing a time-separation job on Track 61, but it ate my reply. Here's the killer problem:

Mainline rail and LRT/HRT use different wheel profiles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_train_and_tram_tracks. They aren't fully compatible, as you can see from the diagram, because the rails and wheels are ground to a different performance profile. A trolley can run on RR tracks at a rail museum no-foul because any of their cars would only run a few times a day at restricted speed and limited-liability. And Norfolk Southern freights do run on a tiny few-block end section of Newark Light Rail's newest branch where the last couple stops shut down early for the evening once or twice a week so one last freight customer beyond the terminal stop can be served; they turn the overhead off and do a light engine move at 5 MPH. But the escalated derailment and mechanical wear risk from the incompatibility is too high for acceptable quality control on an all-day public transit service, and too high for the 7-night-a-week port freight that CSX will eventually be running to Marine Terminal. There are extremely few examples worldwide where a transit system will even hold its nose and play with that fudge factor, because it just chews up empty-calorie maint costs.


The only ways around this are:

1) Order trolleys with a RR wheel profile, like NJ Transit does with the RiverLINE. Those trolleys would be completely incompatible with Green/Red/Orange/Blue/Mattapan, meaning you would never get thru-running. When the RiverLINE's service growth makes it ripe to graduate to electrification and switchover from piggish DLRV's to regular stock LRV's, NJT will buy Hudson-Bergen/Newark -clone rolling stock for it...but they'll still be fitted with the RR wheel profile and won't be able to pool with the rest of the agency's light rail division.


2) Order or modify stock with dual-profile wheelsets, at additional complexity. This is done in a *few* places worldwide (examples given in the Wikipedia article), and is done in a few places--most notably SEPTA's weird-tech Norristown High Speed Line--that retain legacy design cruft from long gone days where the vehicles used to interline with time-separated freight. But note that very few places bother to do it at all, because past a certain service scale it's more cost-effective to go for full traffic separation and fully orthodox rolling stock. Or they only do the dual-profile wheels as a short-lived transitional era. All it takes is a once-over with a rail grinder to change the profile at the track level from RR to tram/metro, so nobody bothers keeping dual-profile wheel sets for one second longer than they absolutely have to and nearly always gravitate to full-orthodox tram/metro wheels as soon as they can achieve traffic separation. If the RiverLINE's freight ever goes 100% extinct, you can bet your bottom-dollar that NJ Transit's going to immediately re-grind the rails and switch its vehicle to fully orthodox tram-profile wheels so the whole statewide light rail division is under one maximum-scale interchangeable spec.


------------------------

Where does this become lethal for Track 61? Not because it's such a pain to retrofit for dual wheel profiles. That's pretty simple. It's the limited scale that kills it, on account of Track 61 already being a niche prospect before even counting up the whittling-down effects.

  • Dual-profile wheel retrofits are probably too much to ask for on the fragile 75-year-old PCC fleet (per Ari's blog suggestion for fleet reassignment).

  • The Type 7's just came back from rebuild with all-new trucks under parts & service warranty for 10 more years. Going 'off- instruction manual' with new kludges--whether fully feasible or not--is not going to be kosher with the warranty they need to keep those brand new parts serviceable for the 10-15 years those vehicles have to remain a backbone fleet.

  • LOL! on running the Bredas in any situation that could ever make them derail more often than they already do.

  • Setting aside 6 out of 200+ cars to maintain with different wheel sets runs into the same problem as setting aside 10 old-timey PCC's in a modern fleet of 200+ cars. The maint scale is terrible, and an agency with dire staffing problems can't maintain enough people's qualifications for those components to get the Track 61 fleet promptly repaired. If keeping the PCC's long-term at all requires them to be gutted/rebuilt as fully orthodox and modern under the hood, then uncorking another component fragmentmentation instance in an even more niche setting flunks the cost-benefit test even worse than Mattapan.

  • Interlining. Will never ever happen between Track 61 and the Green Line, so all your dreams of planting the flag here as a placeholder first then stringing together something grander are for naught. We already have enough LRV design quirks forced by the 1897 Central Subway that there's no way dual-profile wheels across the whole system are ever going to be thrown in as the cherry on top of all the other quirks that contort fleet design costs. Track 61 is nowhere near value-added enough to do battle with that dragon on a new front. There's a very good reason that Urban Ring Phase II LRT concepts throw trolley tracks in the Haul Road in mixed truck traffic instead of widening the freight reservation. Note also this is the exact reason why any LRT hybridization of the Grand Junction through Cambridge is verboten until you completely remove the branch from the FRA rail network...no can do there from the Central Subway.

  • Freight & freight legalities. CSX still retains freight rights the full length of Track 61, and cannot be pressured or compelled to give them up against its will per about 2 centuries of interstate commerce law. Massport also has fully articulated plans to build out mission-critical port rail service to Marine Terminal after the Harbor is dredged for PanMax ships, with CSX already agreeing to serve it on a daily overnight out of Readville if Massport produces the business. Unlike those 4 blocks of Newark Light Rail trolley track that Norfolk Southern traverses couple times a week to switch one local customer with 3 or 4 cars, 1.5 miles of Track 61 every night handling 20+ car multimodal loads at an international shipping terminal with Customs and insurance processing is not going to be red-tape kosher. There is literally nothing the City or any local biz interest could offer these players in indemnification to make it worth their while for the freights to take on 100% of the maint and derailment risk. They all (but none more than CSX) crap bigger'n City of Boston. Stop any abject fantasies of "Aww, be a friend!" altruism on their part before they even form in one's head, because the whole history of interstate commerce says otherwise.


The scale just doesn't come close to overcoming the hurdles. Casting lonely eyes to Track 61 in the first place is itself in exercise in niche-fitting when you're nearly out of options to begin with, so it's already a narrow and low-odds target to have to thread to find a cost-benefit valuation that doesn't get upended by very small/chintzy things. Wheel profile is not a showstopper at any real-world technical level. Very much not so; it doesn't take some Rube Goldberg device to do that. But it is just enough a showstopper on scale for the microscopic operating margins Track 61 service has to live inside of a very vast rapid transit system to make that sort of spot customization any sort of value-added. Especially when interlining with the Green Line is a forever-impossible.

And that's in a nutshell the selection-bias problem of chasing niches in the first place, and why Track 61 is such an outsized frustration/obsession for planners. It seems so simple in concept that there MUST be a way to pull it off, therefore we should keep digging in with a new annual proposal that passes the Shirley Leung smell test! But with niche margins like that the chintzy things are the showstoppers that make it operate as an off-scale loss leader no sane person would spend money on over other priorities. Once it's run afoul of its margins with a couple chintzy demerits like wheel profile fragmenting the equipment pool and forever ruling out interlining...building it at all becomes more a battle of "Oh, yeah! I'll show 'em!" spite than solving problems. Maybe that's acceptable in the vacuum of the Crazy Transit Pitches thread, but when the lack of a Silver Line Phase III replacement build is the pants-shitting threat that may level off the Seaport's growth prematurely...in the real world overpaying for limited functionality on the narrowest of niches as distraction to the big problem is going to get deep-pocketed interests out for these distracted pols' and planners' scalps. i.e. "Why aren't we doing the thing that matters most 'to say you can' instead of this???"


Same promise dashed as running a piggish DMU dinky through Amtrak's backyard. Yeah, it works in concept. Yeah, it's semi-useful. No...it's a godawful loss leader and wretched use of fleet resources for what impossibly narrow fare recovery target it takes to make it justify its existence. We probed that already. Now we're just substituting different modes and flailing at things like "maybe there's a thousand riders living under a rock in Hyde Park who can appear out of nowhere." Same blockers hit from different angles.

Unfortunately, we've kind of established the predictive value of trying 10 more new angles for trying to make 61 a 'thing'...and they're all just as unfavorable. We've already taken our best shot at pegging best value proposition for 61, and it's just never better than borderline-leaning-unfavorable. The danger now is simply that the City/BCEC just become ever more obsessive about coming at it again and again and again with the same repackaged pitch until the distraction starts to sideline the rest of the Seaport transpo improvements universe. Like I said last page...it is entirely within the City's own independent means to make some phone calls about a for-cheap private LMA shuttle trial next year using Haul Road on this same alignment, where they can make a case for state aid rooted in actual ridership from the trial. Starts to become hypocritical to obsess about loss-leader 61 proposals that can't be done in this political environment inside this crippled agency in under 7-10 years when that burnt bandwidth leaves more mundane, self-starting options on the table. Can't let niche-chasing run amok or the distorting effects start to become their own form of paralysis. We've seen that happen in some Crazy Transit Pitches grudge matches; we don't need it breaking out inside of Walsh's office.
 
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Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

In another thread EMUs were discussed as being significantly better than DMUs for something like the Fairmount line for a host of reasons. Since both ends of the line are already electrified, it seems like it would be releatively easy to string up catenary, and I imagine the people living near the line would prefer electrics to Diesels. Would the federal government pitch in to pay for this (assuming they wouldn't help pay for the actual trains) since Amtrak uses electric? The benefit for them would being able to send some trains down Fairmount to South Station instead of always using the Southwest Corridor.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Deetroyt said:
In another thread EMUs were discussed as being significantly better than DMUs for something like the Fairmount line for a host of reasons. Since both ends of the line are already electrified, it seems like it would be releatively easy to string up catenary, and I imagine the people living near the line would prefer electrics to Diesels. Would the federal government pitch in to pay for this (assuming they wouldn't help pay for the actual trains) since Amtrak uses electric? The benefit for them would being able to send some trains down Fairmount to South Station instead of always using the Southwest Corridor.
Click to expand...

Amtrak has plans to upgrade the power draw at Southampton Yard for their own traffic growth needs. It's bulleted in the NEC Infrastructure Improvements Master Plan document from a few years ago. That's one of the prerequisites.

Also depends on where their terminal layover yard ends up. Currently they're planning to use their easement at Beacon Park post- Pike realignment as a main storage yard. That's a short-term constraint for adding electrification because the Beacon St. overpass of the tracks is too low for a 25 kV live wire to safely clear the tops of a commuter rail bi-level. They can't undercut the trackbed to solve this because of the adjacent Yawkey platforms, so the bridge will have to be replaced or the span section over the tracks replaced to use thinner girders. Thankfully that bridge is already in pretty horrible condition and will certainly be on MassHighway's replacement list in a few years. It's maybe next-most critical Pike SGR line item inside the city after the Comm Ave. overpass rehab.

It would be a lot better if the 30-train storage at Widett Circle displacing the Food Market could be arranged as an alternative to Beacon Park, because its central location next to Southampton and wired tracks running through it makes it a far superior and less costly location for electrics. Not to mention way better land use because you can set up that train yard for air rights decking whereas you can't at the Beacon Park easement and are just wasting empty-calorie acreage. Unfortunately Widett requires joint cooperation with the City and BRA/BDPA to grease the skids, and that lowers the odds of getting the superior plan enacted because of how futile it is to get these agencies (especially BRA vs. state) to work together. Therefore the T has no choice but to default to BP unless something more attractive gets opened up for them; MassDOT controls the BP easement in-full and doesn't need to rely on notorious flake local institutions to give them a hand.

Also...Amtrak is a notorious pain in the ass to work with on sharing its electrical plant. They routinely abuse their ownership of the overhead with other commuter rail agencies by jacking rates and making onerous maint requests. Since the T and AMTK are not exactly buddy-buddy to begin with, division of responsibilities needs to be spelled out crystal...fricking...clear in the Memorandum of Understanding that gets signed prior to commuter rail electrification. They have *somewhat* more power-sharing leverage than other states by being line owner, but since Amtrak is still lord and master of all track structures in MA there's still high potential for conflict. Preventative action needed or they're sure to butt heads in a mini-drama once every couple of years.

--------------------

If you can solve the layover situation in due time, then it's very straightforward.

  • Double the capacity of Sharon substation, halfway between Canton Jct. and Sharon. Amtrak only built it to pump out enough juice to power its own trains; the T, ConnDOT/Shore Line East, and RIDOT all have to pay their own way on capacity increases for commuter trains. Note that the Sharon parcel is only half-full and has empty equipment hookups. That's where the T would install equipment for the power increase. Pricey, but one upgrade here would enable full Providence Line electrics + chaining Fairmount + Riverside off of Sharon sub. It's only if you electrify anything else that they're going to have to build their own substations instead of adding onto this one.
    • For this reason Stoughton would not be part of the electrification if you're prioritizing the Indigos. Bridge too far for chaining off Sharon without an additional substation, and service levels are not nearly high enough to get all completist about that branch this way early in the system electrification game.

  • Install wires on all Attleboro station platform tracks. Right now it's incomplete because Amtrak doesn't stop there and stays on the 2 center tracks. Trivial cost...the catenary poles are already there with hangars for the unpowered tracks.

  • Install paralleling stations every ~6 miles for new electrification. Since there's already one at Readville, they'd only need to put one at/near the midpoint of the Fairmount Line to handle that full branch. 2--one at Riverside, one somewhere at the midpoint--if they did that Indigo branch.

  • Wire clearance. You need 2.5 ft. of clearance for a 25 kV line over an unshielded car roof for safe wire clearance from any arcing potential. Commuter rail cars have some roof shielding, but freight does not. Therefore at all undergrade Fairmount bridges they would need 17' + 2.5' = 19.5' of clearance for future freight service to Southie. Worcester Line already has this points west of Beacon Park, so it's just that Beacon St. bridge that's a problem. Most of the overhead bridges on the Fairmount Line are already OK for this due to the recent blitz of MassDOT rapid replacements. Any that aren't can probably be trackbed-undercut in a single weekend no-problem. Morton St. and Fairmount stations are the only platforms closest enough to a bridge to make undercutting impossible...but the new Morton St. bridge I'm almost certain is fully-cleared, and eyeball test shows Fairmount Ave. is high enough above the platform canopies that that one is almost certainly OK.

  • Outer layovers. RIDOT has to be funded enough to wire up big Pawtucket layover. Not a problem except for them being a small state that can only pivot point-to-point on major funding. This is probably one place where a fed grant would really help. Readville Yard 2 wouldn't be that hard to wire, as Fairmount only uses a couple berths for its outer layover.

  • T.F. Green station mods. Right now the lone platform track can't be electrified because it's the only place the autorack freight trains from Quonset Point have overhead clearance. Trackbed at the platform is undercut by about 2 ft. from the wired Amtrak tracks. To wire that up you would have to: 1) build the northbound platform on the opposite end on a Track 4 turnout; 2) wire it up; 3) temp-shift Amtrak to Track 4; 4) undercut the two center tracks by 4 ft. so the autoracks can pass under the wires; 5) shift Amtrak back; 6) wire the existing platform. Annoying, will take Amtrak coordination...but not that expensive. Another place RIDOT could probably benefit from a fed grant.




If they wanted to go for it and were really-really dead-set on it, then they'd want a 5-year window for doing all this prelim construction before the EMU vehicle order arrives. It's not a lot of steel-and-concrete construction unless Beacon Park is still the layover and the Beacon St. overpass hasn't been taken care of. 5 years is plenty for installing the electrical components, doing up the layovers, and ensuring that the RIDOT pieces like T.F. Green get fully completed.


What that means for vehicles is that they'd probably want to watch closely NJ Transit's upcoming procurement to replace its very old and worn out Arrow EMU's. They have an engineering firm contracted out to design specs for a bi-level EMU stuffed inside the carbody of a Bombardier MultiLevel coach. Specs should be delivered (nowish?) since the firm has been working on this for 2 years now, but intra-agency chaos is pretty much the only thing delaying issuing a formal RFP so they're probably not in a terrible hurry while other priorities are consuming them. The MLV's are very similar to our Kawasaki/Rotem bi-levels except about a foot shorter (slightly less headroom) for Penn Station clearances, 2 x 2 instead of 3 x 2 seating, and a double door-pair arrangement on the vestibules. The EMU version of the MLV would just marry that tincan and its seating capacity with self-propulsion and probably the rote-standard singlet and married-pair configurations that most EMU's come in. NJT is a nearly all-Bombardier shop, so their RFP for this is pretty much going to be a grooved fastball for BBD to knock out of the park. Their Talent EMU's are very battle-tested under 25 kV electrification in Euro-land. The only major engineering challenge is that this would be a first-time bi-level make for that propulsion and would have to have brawny enough power to pull the heavier frame and heavier human flesh of the bi-level seating capacity, as well as have good enough regenerative braking to shrink the radiators enough for the guts to fit under the car without cannibalizing interior seats. Not a huge technical challenge, but it is a configuration Bombardier's never tried before.


IF the NJT make proves to be a winner, that would be the EMU make that could bust the market wide open. NJT, MARC, and AMT in Montreal already use the MLV coaches...SEPTA (for its rush-hour push-pulls) and the MTA for both Metro North and LIRR are planning to order those coaches to completely replace their single-level push-pull fleets. That makes the EMU version extremely attractive for those agencies, because the per-car seating capacity is rote-consistent with their push-pull MLV coaches. Especially attractive for SEPTA to consider semi-parasitically tagging along with the NJT Arrow-replacement order to replace its ancient Silverliner IV's (and avoid another custom-design debacle like the Silverliner V's). Ditto AMT to augment/replace its MR-90's. The same exact EMU's will also be served up in a Bombardier BiLevel tincan (the single most popular commuter rail coach make in N. America) for agencies in 8-inch boarding territory; GO Transit in Toronto is extremely likely to buy BLV EMU's now that they have committed to electrification.


With that kind of market scale, the T could place an order at the trailing end of these other agencies' orders and get a battle-tested EMU that works as a Providence crowd-swallower and a good-enough Indigo vehicle (because of the 2 x 2 instead of 3 x 2 seating) at an attractive price point. More attractive unit price than NJT or SEPTA because they can order theirs with only 60 Hz/25 kV transformers instead of the 60 Hz/25 kV + 25 Hz/12.5 kV, and 60 Hz/12.5 kV transformers that all other NEC-member agencies have to order (lot less weight!). And flexibility to streeeeeeetch out their cars way at the back end of all these orders to give themselves ample time to complete all the electrification infrastructure work. Possibly with even further-stretched option orders so they can tackle full Worcester Line electrification as next step. The only thing they have to avoid is over-customization. Just order the same rote thing that NJT is ordering in Purple livery. Don't get all cutesy; we know what inevitably happens when they get all customization-cutesy.



Long story short...watch with interest what happens with the NJT EMU order over the next 2 years. Because that could be a game-changer at lowering the barrier of entry.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

Blue Hill Avenue station is out to bid. $19M seems awfully fishy for a basic station, especially when the other stations on the line cost less than $10M each just a few years ago.
 
Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade

The EGE said:
Blue Hill Avenue station is out to bid. $19M seems awfully fishy for a basic station, especially when the other stations on the line cost less than $10M each just a few years ago.
Click to expand...

Its fishy that the station itself wasn't built a few years ago. Wait, by fishy I meant a joke.
 
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